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It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!

Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.

Well I went digging around because this sounded a little too odd and because the only source was a tiny news story that gave no details. Wikipedia’s Vegemite entry mentions the ban but is equivocal about the veracity of the reports and if you check the history and the discussion page there’s quite a debate about whether or not its real.

So I went to the horses mouth – I left a feedback message on the Vegemite website asking about whether this was real or not and (to my suprise) got a rapid response from Kraft Foods, which I’m waiting to see if they’ll give me permission to quote.

The summary is that the news story is pretty much accurate, if a little old, Kraft Foods haven’t been exporting Vegemite to the US for 12 months now because of the US FDA’s regulations on what foods are allowed to have folate fortification.

Andrew’s done a neat trick and now has caller ID appearing on his television courtesy of combining Asterisk and MythTV. He’s got interesting plans..

Next I need to see if I can pause the TV, and resume it when the call ends.

Be nice if you could mark a program as “do not disturb” and get Asterisk to silently divert them to its voicemail system until it’s over, or phone up and tell it to record something you forgot (when you’ve not got Internet access).

There are two NVIDIA graphics drivers for Linux: a closed-source binary blob driver provided by NVIDIA (which provides acceleration) and an open-source driver (which lacks acceleration). NVIDIA’s binary blob driver contains an error in its accelerated rendering of glyphs (text character data) that can be exploited to write arbitrary data to anywhere in memory. The open-source driver is not vulnerable.

There have been multiple public reports of this NVIDIA bug on the NVNews forum [1,2] and elsewhere, dating back to 2004 [3]. NVIDIA’s first public acknowledgement of this bug was on July 7th, 2006. In a public posting [1] on the NVNews forum, an NVIDIA employee reported having reproduced the problem, assigned it bug ID 239065, and promised a fix would be forthcoming.

Matching libraries: /usr/lib/libpthread.so.20 /lib/ld-linux.so.2
A copy of glibc was found in an unexpected directory.
It is not safe to upgrade the C library in this situation;
please remove that copy of the C library and try again.

As you might guess, this blocks apt-get dist-upgrade because it is (not unreasonably) being paranoid about not leaving your system in an completely stuffed state. So I went and consulted the Oracle and found a rather nice page on debugging dpkg dependency problems by Dan Shearer, an ex-Aussie now in Edinburgh.

I’m going to give this a try and see what happens, if you don’t hear from me for a few days then you know I messed something up. 🙂